


A Suitable Gift

by sophiagratia



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Books, Female Friendship, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-29
Updated: 2013-05-29
Packaged: 2017-12-13 08:54:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/822422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiagratia/pseuds/sophiagratia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kathryn, Seven, Tuvok, and the inefficient pleasure of the codex book.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Suitable Gift

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cosmic_llin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmic_llin/gifts).



Seven doesn’t want to learn about pleasure in material things.   
  
Books are inefficient, she says. They frustrate her. Typeface is irrelevant, linen paper is irrelevant, calf bindings are irrelevant. It’s difficult to make her see the amenities of old technologies, and the codex book eludes her entirely. It’s difficult to be patient with the words _inefficient_ , _irrelevant_.  
  
‘The book is an assemblage of features incidental to information, which impede rather than facilitate access to information. I do not see its use.’ It’s sweet, how she tries to keep disdain out of her voice. But still she will scarcely touch a book, as though allergic to a thing so opaque to her. A thing so caught in its _thing_ ness violates all her sensibilities. It’s almost an insult to her, the resolute materiality of the book.  
  
Reading is frustrating enough for her. What she wants is to touch her fingertips to an interface and assimilate a code; what she wants are fiberoptic veins that can carry strings of numbers from her fingertips to her brain in effortless near-instantaneity.  
  
That she must read in slow, linear human time – she feels that as an act of violence.   
  
Perhaps, after all, it is.   
  
It’s the first thing that makes Kathryn doubt herself. This allergy of Seven’s to reading and to the codex book, these old familiar human things that Kathryn takes for granted. What gives Kathryn the most comfort is a thing that alienates Seven. It’s the first thing that makes Kathryn think she’s done wrong, that it’s an act of cruelty to ask that Seven assimilate herself to what Kathryn thinks she knows of what it means to be human.   
  
But what’s done can’t be undone. And guilt will get her nowhere. So she tries to teach Seven to take pleasure in material things.   
  
She spends long hours with the replicator in her quarters; she endures months of Neelix’s gastronomical experiments and coffee-substitutes to save credits for books.   
  
To appeal to Seven’s mathematical mind, she first tries the compacted machinery of the sonnet. In slender octavo volumes, she gifts Seven with John Donne, with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with Fionnula O’Flaherty. Seven is quick to set her mind to poetic contraptions – their puzzles please her. But the first thing she does is cross-reference her new books with the ship’s database and create a file of poetry more efficient to her needs.  
  
She puts the books back into the replicator, and Kathryn doesn’t bother trying to explain the hurt that causes her.   
  
Kathryn has more luck with the old pulp genres, and with detective novels in particular. It’s funny, she thinks, that her replicator should be so good at producing the kind of acidic paper that’s ready to fall apart the moment it’s produced, the shoddy glue that scarcely wants to keep a binding on. Seven’s pleasure in these is in their sheer absurdity.   
  
Kathryn should not, perhaps, have sold so hard the codex book’s inimitable gift for survival. She wastes her breath on a history of vellum in a bid to rescue her argument, and meanwhile an entire genre crumbles in Seven’s hands. It’s the first time Kathryn sees Seven laugh for true.   
  
But Seven is quick to divine the codes of genre, and she tires when she’s exhausted the novelty of suspense. Into the replicator with those volumes, too, then.   
  
Kathryn keeps trying. And failing.   
  
Seven refuses to take pleasure in material things.   
  
‘May I ask,’ Tuvok says one evening, ‘why this endeavor is of such importance to you?’ He holds his own bound volume open on his lap. It’s rare that he should interrupt his reading, impossible that he’s distracted, so the question startles Kathryn.   
  
‘Well – !’ She gestures emphatically. He cocks an eyebrow. ‘This, obviously.’   
  
‘The referent of your demonstrative pronoun is non-obvious, Captain,’ he says, and he gets away with it because she knows he’d win if she started the argument she wants to start about how ill-befitting sarcasm is to Vulcan social codes.   
  
Sarcastic or not, he’s right – about the non-obviousness of this. It hadn’t occurred to her before. What she meant was _this_ – the quiet way that she and Tuvok can share an evening reading together. His patience with her penchant for exclamatory quoting-aloud. His pleasure in her appreciation of ancient Vulcan bookmaking technologies. It would be so easy for her volatility and his stoic patience to be forever at intellectual odds, and the importance of _this_ is that it’s a place for them to share their willingness to teach each other, to learn from each other, to share this pleasure they take in reading and in books. _This_ is a strong site of their friendship; this has come to signify friendship itself.   
  
She rolls her eyes and smiles at him. She doesn’t need to explain any of that to him. He has already understood all that, and something more: that she has taken _this_ for granted, and generalized _this_ to mean not just this one mode of this one friendship, but all possible relationship.  
  
‘You are trying to assimilate her, Kathryn,’ he says. ‘You are unlikely to succeed.’ _You bloody hypocrite_ , he’d say if he weren’t – well, him.  
  
‘Fair enough,’ she says, both to his spoken words and to their implication.   
  
So she stops trying, with Seven, because it’s not that Seven doesn’t want to learn pleasure in reading and in the materiality of the book – it’s that she shouldn’t be asked to learn something that is irrelevant to her.   
  
It’s a surprise, then, when some weeks later Seven turns up at her door with a gift. Kathryn was long in learning to register Seven’s subtle shifts in tone and bearing as indices of emotion, but she can see now that Seven carries her weight on the balls of her feet, that her eyes are just a little more than usually wide and bright.   
  
‘I have observed your enthusiasm for the poetry of the twenty-third century, Captain. I have – taken the liberty – of reproducing this volume, on the speculation that it would be... of interest to you.’ With her characteristic gestural precision, Seven proffers the fine, slim quarto in her hands. ‘In twenty-two seventy-four,' she says, confident in the realm of fact, 'Marianne McGovern collaborated with Aisling Flanagan, printer of the works of Fionnula O’Flaherty, then recently deceased, in this compilation of the significant works of Irish women poets of that era.’ Seven’s hesitation might be imperceptible to anyone else, but Kathryn reads her nervous embarrassment as clearly as the gilt-embossed title of the volume in her hands. ‘I have concluded that this constitutes a suitable gift. Is my assessment correct?’  
  
Kathryn wants to clasp Seven in her arms and exclaim aloud her deeply moved affection, but she restrains herself.   
  
‘Most suitable, Seven,’ is all she says. ‘Come in.’   
  
She takes the book in her hands; she permits herself to hold it close. Seven settles on the couch. She has brought her drafting board, and she sets quickly to work devising new schematics for engine-enhancements B’Elanna had assigned to her. Her fingertips move more swiftly and more elegantly across the screen than any stylus could, and Kathryn takes a moment to admire the architecture of her implants and the peace it brings Seven to be at one with another machine, for a while.  
  
‘Coffee, black,’ Kathryn says to the replicator with a sigh of relief. She too settles, with her book. She lingers over its exquisite frontispiece, its cleverly decorative running heads, its wryly purposeful index. She reads, occasionally, aloud, and she knows Seven is listening because her fingertips move to the even metrical rhythms of the Renaissance revival.  
  
‘Thank you, Seven,’ Kathryn says at length. Seven looks up, nods crisply, and returns to her work. Perhaps no one but Kathryn would be able to see in that her deep satisfaction – the pleasure she takes not in the book but in Kathryn’s pleasure in it.  
  
This, then, this non-obvious thing, is friendship, too. And maybe, Kathryn thinks, thumbing the fine linen pages of Seven’s gift, it’s she who has something to learn, from Seven and from this.


End file.
